Is this overly hopeful, or could India do this? Will they need NASA help and could NASA make a load of cash from that?

India has a wonderful culture, and great people but the government there is usually a mess, large scale poverty, child slavery, cast system....I'm happy to see the good and positive changes going on in India due to economic growth but there are still behind in many areas. On space they have done no projects for manned flights before, have launched some satellites but have little experience in exploration, and one the last ISRO launches ended in an explosion. As for India's robotic exploration, there isn't much there and they have done little when compared to the achievements of the Japanese or Europeans.

I won't say its impossible for India to land a man on the Moon by 2020, but they don't even have a man-rated rocket and they'd want to get their program up to speed quick if they want to play with the big boys in Russia or the USA.

MartianBase - 2/11/2006 1:17 AMI won't say its impossible for India to land a man on the Moon by 2020, but they don't even have a man-rated rocket and they'd want to get their program up to speed quick if they want to play with the big boys in Russia or the USA.

Agreed, if it was a major national objective like Apollo was for the US, there isn't any reason to think they couldn't do it. However, given the much more pressing issues facing India at the moment, it's very hard to see that level of commitment.

If they pursue manned flight at all, I would expect it to be at a slow pace like the Chinese program. The first unmanned test flight of Shenzhou was in 1999. The first manned flight didn't come till 2003. The exact development timeline isn't clear, but according to astronautix, the agreement to buy Soyuz technology was completed in 1995, with construction of test articles started that year. That's 8 years from committing to the program to flying a manned flight, despite significant heritage from an existing spacecraft, and a fair bit of work on manned flight prior to that. Of course, China ended up with capable spacecraft, completely bypassing the Vostok/Voskhod/Mercury phase.

If they do follow roughly the same pace as China, that would put the first manned flight around 2014, which is what the article suggests. Hmm.

If India decided to start with a Vostok equivalent craft, development could be quicker. OTOH, they have less spaceflight experience than China did at the start of Shenzhou, and if they are serious about using indigenous technology, that will likely slow things down. A manned lunar flight only 6 years after the first manned flight seems highly optimistic, especially given the lack of a suitable launcher.

This article looks to me like the press once again confusing what the space program engineers want to do with what the politicians have committed to fund, but the talk of a near future capsule test is pretty intriguing.

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A formal project report will be submitted to the government before the end of the year and trials will start in early 2007.

ISRO will conduct a space-capsule-recovery experiment. A 600-kg module, which will be hoisted by a PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket, will orbit the earth for a week and splash down in the Bay of Bengal from where it will be retrieved. The experiment will be repeated in 2008.

Does this mean they have designed the initial capsule and are looking for final go-ahead to fly it ? Unless they have actually started bending metal, the timeline seems pretty optimistic. There also doesn't seem to be any mention of this project on the ISRO site.

Converting the obscure units, the reported cost is rs 100-150 billion, or roughly 2.2-3.3 billion USD at todays rates. That would be ~275-410 million USD/year for an 8 year program. For comparison, the entire ISRO budget for 2006-2007 was reported as $815 million here http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive06/Isro_030606.html

Payload wise, PSLV and GSLV are sufficient to launch a modest manned capsule, but neither would be my first choice for a manned launcher.

But India won't be seen as a "threat" - we need one of the bad boys to start pushing on this to give the US a reason to push themselves

India was something of a rival during the Coldwar, as far as I remember Nixon, Kissinger and even Carter hated them for their stance next to the Russians, Nixon used to call Indira Gandhi some nasty names.

vt_hokie - 2/11/2006 8:24 PMChina has its share of poverty, and it hasn't stopped them from putting together a manned space program.

Development wise, China is in a much better position. India is doing reasonably well, but it has nothing like the massive industrial base and huge trade surplus that China does. India is also a democracy, and so unlike China, would have to justify the expenditure to the people.

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MartianBaseIndia was something of a rival during the Coldwar

The cold war is over and attitudes in Washington have obviously changed. In the 90s, we tried to block the transfer of cryogenic engine tech from Russia on the dubious grounds that it was missile proliferation (because as we all know LOX/LH2 makes great ICBMs...) Today, the administration is pushing for an agreement on selling civilian nuclear technology to them. Barring drastic changes, this pragmatic approach is likely to continue, as it is in our interest to promote the continued development of a reasonably stable secular democracy.

This years budget was reported as $815 million here http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive06/Isro_030606.html so it would be more like a 50% increase. No completely implausible, but not exactly small change either. This years figure was reportedly a 35% increase from previous years, and includes GSLV 3 development.